The Village Against the World (21 page)

Spain’s film crews and journalists were once again zeroing in on Marinaleda, waiting patiently for Sánchez Gordillo’s next outburst, or the next piece of direct action from the
Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores
(SAT). When the crisis started sinking Spain, it raised up the one existing alternative in its midst, throwing the village’s exceptional past and unique present into sharper relief than ever. The
indignados
were more than a protest movement, they had declared their desire for a different way of living; and so, despite its awkward size and location, Marinaleda was the
obvious choice for an Andalusian-wide 15-M reunion rally in November 2011.

Sánchez Gordillo described this event as a kind of Andalusian awakening: it was video-streamed from their town hall to tens of thousands, and hundreds of visitors came for the occasion. When he addressed the meeting, he spoke, at breakneck speed as usual, about dreams and injustices, and the urgent need to mend the gap between the utopian ideal and the grim reality. He finished his speech by quoting Che’s words: ‘Only those who dream will someday see their dreams converted to reality.’ He added that it was not enough to believe in a different world – it was time to have the courage to live as if it had already arrived.

Other speakers at the rally included spokespeople from a new anti-capitalist co-operative in Valencia, and Enric Duran, an infamous young Catalan who borrowed €492,000 from thirty-nine different financial institutions, with no intention of paying it back, and distributed it among a variety of different co-operatives and revolutionary projects. If Marinaleda is Asterix’s village, pluckily holding out against the Romans despite the enormous odds stacked against them, then 15-M was like a simultaneous discovery, across the vast reaches of the empire, that maybe everyone else had access to the magic potion, too.

When I interviewed Sánchez Gordillo that winter, he was, as usual, entirely confident in his world-view and the
stark contrast between what they were creating and the world outside. To his credit, there was not a sliver of triumphalism in his analysis; it was stern, and sober.

‘The myth of capitalism has crumbled,’ he announced, ‘that the market is an omnipotent God that fixes everything with his invisible hand. We’ve seen this is a great lie, a stupid fundamentalism: we’ve seen that in times of crisis, markets have had to resort to the state, and that states are putting money into the banks.’

And so they were – hundreds of billions of euros’ worth. In Spain, 75 per cent of debt is private. There was no extravagant public spending that created the crisis there; in 2008 Spain’s finances were well within the Eurozone’s fiscal rules, and its government debt as a share of GDP was much lower than Germany’s, a situation they maintained, to begin with. In Spain, essentially, it is the crash which created the debt, not the other way around.

‘If there were any justice in the world the big bankers, and the governments that allowed them to perpetrate their economic terrorism, would be in jail. And those same people who caused the crisis are the ones who now want to fix it. The pyromaniac wants to play the fireman! Mrs Merkel and Mr Sarkozy want to speak for the banks and fix what they caused.

‘Everywhere there’s crisis: an agricultural crisis, an industrial crisis, a financial crisis, a food crisis, a
system
crisis. Before, people had work, so they didn’t think twice about it. Here in Andalusia there was a boom in
construction, and things were getting built everywhere. A construction worker would earn three, four or five thousand euros per month – a lot of money! Then when we lost those jobs, people began losing their homes, because they couldn’t pay the mortgage, so the banks have been repossessing them. And so now people are seeking refuge in agriculture instead, and in other formulas that aren’t those of capitalism.’ And how serious are those formulas? Sánchez Gordillo rejected the idea that 15-M was ‘merely reformist’, as some of its leftist critics have contended: it was developing, he said, ‘an increasingly anti-capitalist vision’.

In London, I told him, big-state social democracy on the post-war model was increasingly seen as finished. The centre-left approach, of a compromise with capitalism, was kaput: apart from anything else, if someone won’t meet you halfway, it’s not a compromise anymore. Just like 15-M, the people at Occupy London and Occupy Wall Street were looking for alternative models wherever they could find them, however obscure the location. In fact, I explained, that’s kind of what brought me here. He nodded sympathetically.

‘People no longer care if it’s this party or another party, PP or PSOE; they want to change the system to one that isn’t capitalistic, with unions, parties and organisations that promote a different system, with human beings at the core. People are considered merchandise: while they’re profitable, they’re used, and when they’re no longer
profitable, they’re discarded. We have to change these cruel and inhuman values. I have dedicated my entire life to this.’

He wrote ‘PP’ and ‘PSOE’ on the scrap paper in front of him, drew a circle around each, then one bigger circle around the outside. Stabbing the edge of this impromptu Venn diagram with the point of the pencil, he said simply: ‘It’s
all
capitalism.’

A few months later, Sánchez Gordillo had his contempt for ‘the capitalist parties’ and his sense of realpolitik tested, when he was unexpectedly given the chance to take some small parliamentary advantage of the crisis. Following the general election at the end of 2011, March 2012 saw elections to the regional parliament in Seville: the PP were the largest party by a sliver but did not win a majority, and the prospect of a PSOE–IU coalition emerged. During the weeks of coalition talks, Sánchez Gordillo was being widely mentioned as a possible minister in a hypothetical PSOE–IU government – something which would have required him to abandon the mayoralty, and abandon Marinaleda both politically and geographically. He had been a deputy while still living in the village, but he couldn’t be a minister and not move to Seville.

A compromise with the PSOE would have brought Sánchez Gordillo a great deal more power and influence, a bigger bully pulpit, and a voice in policy-making across Andalusia. Instead, he launched a revolt.

The PSOE, he announced, were a party without principle – and if they went into coalition with this ‘capitalist’ party, IU would be, too. ‘We cannot bring ourselves closer to the sinking ship’, Sánchez Gordillo told
El Mundo
, and warned in the strongest possible language that such a coalition would mean legitimising the PSOE and ushering in austerity-lite, while sending the left ‘to hell’ as a stooge of the capitalist parties. As it happened, IU split in two, the party leadership made a pact with the PSOE, and Sánchez Gordillo’s warnings about more austerity and cuts were almost immediately vindicated. It was an articulation of another of his maxims: if you can’t win the fight, at least keep faith with your principles.

The first time we met, I’d noticed how his gesticulations grew increasingly theatrical and effusive, and his trilled rrrr’s ever faster, ever raspier, the bigger the issues and ideas became. He was quite capable of working himself up into a revolutionary tumult, never mind anyone else. At the time I wondered if he was being wasted on such a small stage, as the mayor of a village of 2,700 people. What with his long-proven penchant for headline-grabbing actions, not to mention the three-hour declamations on Marinaleda TV, I wondered whether he, too, hankered for a bigger platform. Whether he wanted it or not, by August 2012, he would have it.

Marinaleda had already proven, as far back as 1980, that the month of August was optimal for seizing the national media
narrative in the name of the people. In 2012, they repeated the performance. With members of SAT from other villages – including Sánchez Gordillo’s partner in crime, the union’s national spokesman, Diego Cañamero – they occupied land belonging to the Ministry of Defence, a farm called Las Turquillas. This was, they argued, land in the public domain that did not serve the public. Over 200
jornaleros
camped out for eighteen days, until violently evicted by the Guardia, and used the media attention to call for the land to be cultivated and given over to the unemployed.

It was the first time they had united their prelapsarian belief, that ‘the land belongs to those who work it’, with the new misery of the financial crisis. They were occupying, Sánchez Gordillo told
El Mundo
, on behalf of ’6 million unemployed, 12 million poor people, 1.7 million families with all members unemployed, and 30 per cent of Andalusian families living below the poverty line’. The land’s sole purpose, he explained, was to accrue EU subsidies for the Ministry of Defence, like the
latifundios
belonging to the aristocrats of the House of Alba and Infantado. Neither sets of subsidies were putting any bread on the tables of Andalusian
jornaleros
.

While the land was occupied, tents erected, and cooking rotas put into practice, and they had the press’s attention, SAT moved onto the next stage of their plan. It was to be an ingenious escalation.

Their targets were two major chain-store supermarkets in Andalusia, one a Carrefour in Arcos de la Frontera,
near Cadiz, the other a branch of Mercadona in Écija, down the road from Marinaleda. Several hundred SAT activists showed up at each of the two supermarkets, and while the majority rallied outside, a small group went in, filled ten or so carts with basic foodstuffs – oil, sugar, chickpeas, rice, pasta, milk, biscuits and vegetables – and left without paying. There were some scuffles with a few of the supermarket employees, but in both cases, they emerged with the ‘expropriated’ goods to cheers from the rest of the crowd. The food was then donated to the
Corrala Utopía
in Seville, a series of apartment blocks occupied (with the help of the local 15-M) by homeless families evicted by their banks, and to civic centres in Cadiz, where it would be passed on to the unemployed. The message was impossible to misread: under capitalism – under
la crisis –
major supermarket chains make hundreds of millions of euros in profit for their shareholders from selling food, while hundreds of thousands around them go hungry.

It was both spontaneous and shocking, a deliberate and ostentatious act of Robin Hood–style redistribution; and yet it was well planned enough that they had a professional agency photographer and film crew inside the supermarkets with them, to get footage of the SAT activists loading up the trolleys. These photos, and pictures of Sánchez Gordillo declaiming on his megaphone outside Mercadona, swept the story onto the Spanish front pages, to the top slot in the evening news, and, via Reuters and the
international news wires, across the world – not only in Europe and America, but India, Iran, Australia and China. ‘We want to expropriate the expropriators,’ Sánchez Gordillo declared. ‘By that we mean the landlords, banks and big supermarkets, which are making money from the economic crisis.’

The Spanish establishment panicked. The raids were immediately and aggressively condemned by the PP and the PSOE as wanton, despicable criminality – perpetrated by an elected member of the Andalusian parliament, no less. Even the IU leadership distanced itself from Sánchez Gordillo. José Antonio Griñán, the leader of the PSOE–IU coalition in the Andalusian parliament, called it ‘barbarism’. And yet, the Spanish right struggled to turn the popular mood against Sánchez Gordillo: whether you agreed with the stunt or not, the crisis was so widespread, as was dismay over its uneven effects on the poor, that even cynics understood the point. Popular sympathy seemed to be on their side. Fifty-four per cent of those polled by
El Mundo
, not a left-leaning newspaper by any stretch, supported the action.

Sánchez Gordillo’s success in spinning the raids was in part thanks to his refusal to self-aggrandise and blow them out of proportion. He did not pretend for a minute that expropriating ten trolleys’ worth of rice and chickpeas was an act of redistribution big enough to change any lives: yes, it was a stunt – but it was a vital one. The raids were, in fact, ‘propaganda of the deed’, as he explained to the
media: ‘We are obliged to grab attention in this way so that somebody stops and thinks. They have to understand that people here are desperate.’

Press and TV demand grew throughout August, and the supermarket raids were the media’s main talking point for weeks: news programmes visited Andalusian food banks and soup kitchens, discussed rising food prices, foreclosures, and the impossibility of getting work. When he had finished all of his national (and international) TV spots, Sánchez Gordillo used the brouhaha to announce a three-week march across the Spanish south, in the middle of a devastating August heat wave, to highlight the crisis. The plan was to call upon his fellow small-town mayors along the way and try to persuade them to default on their debt repayments. The rural
pueblos
did not cause the crisis and should not be made to pay for them, he explained; it was an attempt to link up some of the chain of separate communities, to build solidarity. Little came of the march, ostensibly, but it kept the issues – and their iconic advocate, with the grey beard and the keffiyeh – in the headlines for an extra fortnight.

As the dust settled on Marinaleda’s month of notoriety, it became easier to see the expropriations as part of a wider pattern of behaviour. They were a spectacular addition to a growing armoury of acts of everyday anti-capitalist resistance, new (and not so new) coping behaviours brought on by necessity, in the face of the crisis. Barcelona-based sociologist Carlos Delclós identified the
supermarket raids as a ‘public policy correction’, whereby the crisis of legitimacy at the heart of Spanish democracy, at the heart of capitalism, demanded a pro-active intervention from its subjects. ‘We should never forget that democracy means “people power,” ’ he wrote, ‘and that correcting a lack of democracy means exercising power from the bottom up, occupying the cracks in the architecture of repression, and breaking it open like rhizomic roots shattering concrete.’